We’ve gone nuclear this week and decided it was time someone tried to make sense out of the never ending obscurity and procrastination plaguing nuclear energy plans in the Arab world. Egypt has been huffing and puffing about it since the 1950s, and now Saudi Arabia seems to be on track to spend US$80 billion to build 16 reactors by 2030.

Meanwhile, Qatar has officially commenced construction, while Jordan (like Egypt) remains in the limbo of indeterminacy. But we’re giving away too much already. Here’s the full story.

And if that’s not enough to quench your thirst for all things radioactive (did you know that many toothpaste brands were laced with radioactive substances in the past?), we also have two very contrasting Q&A’s on whether Egypt should harness nuclear power or not. On one side of the ring is Yusri Abu Shadi, a former head of Alexandria University’s nuclear engineering department, and he’s quite adamant about Egypt going nuclear. At the other is Hani El-Nokrashy, co-found of Desertec Foundation, and he’s all about going solar instead.

Beyond the hood

Seeing as diabetes has killed some 357,000 people in the Middle East alone last year, you may want to consider giving up soft drinks. A new study suggests that drinking just 336ml of a sugar-sweetened soft drink (roughly, a can) a day can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 22%. And if you are drinking two cans, you are also 22% more likely to develop the disease than the person drinking just one.

The finding is based on data collected across eight European cohorts and covering some 350,000 participants. However, the researchers also found that the risk fell to 18% when total energy intake and body-mass index (BMI) were accounted for — both factors that are thought to mediate the association between sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption and diabetes incidence.

Also, in case you are a soft drinks fan as well as a cigarette smoker, here’s some more troubling news: even a few cigarettes a day can significantly increase the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA) — at least for women. This latest entry in RA research found that just 1 to 7 cigarettes more than doubled the risk of developing the disease.

While stopping smoking reduces the chances, the risk was still significantly higher for women who had given up for 15 years than for those who had never started smoking to begin with.

Over the past five years, the Egyptian government has spent US$500 million treating Hepatitis C (HCV). Despite this, Egypt remains the country with the highest incidence of the disease, and health officials are growing impatient with the current strategy.

So is it time for Egypt to take on a more preventative approach to this epidemic? Check out our latest feature on the debate between HCV prevention and treatment — is it possible that just 10% of the money spent on treatment could be used to prevent new transmissions of the disease altogether?

Also, hopeful news comes from a study just published in Nature on blocking a protein that is stopping adult hearts from regenerating after injury. Mammals have hearts that can generate new heart muscle cells only up to seven days after birth — however, blocking a protein called Meis1 may allow hearts to carry on this capacity safely into adulthood — at least in mice.

Beyond the hood

12.8 billion light-years from Earth — yes, billion — there is (or at least there was) a galaxy churning out nearly 3000 stars per (Earth) year — that’s 2000 times more than our own galaxy.

The massive galaxy was discovered using a global collection of telescopes , and is so distant that the astronomers viewing it are looking at the universe when it was just 6% of its current age. You can read more about this prolific galaxy, called HFLS3, here.

Also interesting this week: apparently there is a brain region that is fully dedicated to recognizing numerals. Just one-fifth of an inch across on the outer cortex of the brain (in an area called the inferior temporal gyrus), neurons  in that region were found to be activated when people view ordinary numerals — that is, 1, 15, and 23, and not one, fifteen and twenty three.

When presented with the numerals spelled out as numbers, activity in that brain area dropped off substantially. Interestingly, while the brain never evolved to have an innate ability to recognize numerals, it seems it can learn to dedicate the 1 to 2 million neurons in this region just to numeral recognition thanks to early elementary education. More details here.

Refugees who have fled from Syria’s ongoing conflict are faced with a different crisis when they arrive in Lebanon: limited access to healthcare and a heightened risk of becoming ill in the overcrowded camps.

With some 40,000 Syrian refugees coming into Lebanon each month, a recently published survey found that only 32.6% of refugee children have been vaccinated against some of the most common diseases such as tetanus, polio and measles. The risk of communicable diseases spreading among the refugees is alarming. You can find the full story here.

A study of a consanguineous Egyptian family in which five siblings are affected by a rare epileptic condition has identified mutations in a particular gene called CNTN2 as the cause. Called cortical myoclonic tremor, the researchers compared the genomes of the siblings with 500 healthy controls and found these mutations present only in the affected siblings. More details here.

Finally, a research team from Cairo University and the University of California have come up with a flexible supercapacitator that promises to help realise the next generation of flexible electronic devices such as electronic paper, displays and health-monitoring kits. Their secret? Graphene. Read more here.

Beyond the hood

Researchers from the University of Granada have found another reason for our readers to get off their backsides and do some exercise: sporty folks seem to have significantly better cognitive capacities than those with more sedentary lifestyles.

These better brain muscles however appear to only highlight sporty people’s capacity to sustain their attention and react rapidly to external stimuli while engaged in monotonous tasks. The article was published in the latest edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

Sporty or not, however, it seems the adults of today are less “metabolically” healthy than their counterparts from previous generations. A large cohort study from the Netherlands compared a range of metabolic risk factors across generations. They found that more recently born generation are doing worse, despite having a greater life expectancy.

Their results show that while obesity and hypertension increase with age across all generations, more recently born generations have a higher prevalence of metabolic risk factors compared to those born ten years earlier. You can find more details here.

Lebanon’s diversity of religious and ethnic backgrounds has not made things too stable there for some time. But beyond the Sunni, Shia, Maronite and about half a dozen other factions along with the tensions that have accompanied them, it seems Lebanese folks are really just one big family sharing a Phoenician heritage  — or at least 30% of Lebanese men are, regardless of any current religious differences.

It’s a finding that Pierre Zalloua, an eminent geneticist from Lebanon, uncovered through his study of the Y-Chromosome to trace the historic movement of human populations. You can read more about Zalloua and his work here.

Also, here’s some tentatively good news: a research team led by the UAE’s Rabah Iratani has found that using leaf extract from a certain herb called marjoram, which is native to Cyrpus and southern Turkey, can inhibit the growth of cultured invasive breast cancer cells. Given in higher concentration, the extract was shown to stop cancer cells from forming colonies — one of the features that make them deadly and invasive. Check out this page for more details.

Finally, as we all know, electric batteries currently face a serious problem: they suck. That is, they don’t last very long between charges. They can become unsafe when they form deposits in their liquid electrolyte, which can also become hot and pressurized, potentially leading them to explode This would not make for a fun ride if this battery is running your electric vehicle.

To circumvent these two problems, Moroccan material scientist Abdelmaula Aboulaich along with other engineers have come up with a lithium battery that uses a solid electrolyte. This prototype stops deposits from forming as well as inhibits the built up of potentially explosive pressure. The battery might be running future electric vehicles.

Beyond the hood

3-D printing has been forecasted as the “next big thing” for a couple of years now, promising to potentially revolutionize how we make and fix things. Oxford University scientists are now further suggesting that it may even change how we heal ourselves.

The researchers made a custom-built 3-D printer that creates materials akin to living tissue that may one day replace damaged tissues. The material is made of thousands of connected water droplets that are encapsulated within lipid films. The fact that the material lacks a genome and does not replicate means it can bypass some of the more common problem associated with other techniques used to replace tissues and organs.

Also, you know how there’s this mysterious thing called dark matter that’s theoretically supposed to compose a quarter of the universe, except no one’s really ever detected it or knows anything about it? Well, the US$2 billion particle detector mounted onto the International Space Station might just have gotten a whiff of it. At least that’s what NASA and CERN jointly announced yesterday. Here’s a good place to get more details.